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Whether your ancestors were royalty or the servants of royalty, it can be just as satisfying and surprising to learn where you come from. Last night’s episode of Who Do You Think You Are? was no exception, when Ricky Tomlinson learned that he came from a hardworking line of carters in Liverpool.The New York of EuropeIn the 1800s, Liverpool was a major port city that depended on carters to transport goods from the docks into the city. As…

Among the oldest continuously published periodicals in the world, Lloyd’s List dates back to 1734. Up until 2013, Lloyd’s List (also known as The List) was printed on a daily basis; since 2013, the publication has been updated hourly in its digital format only. Modern coverage in Lloyd’s List includes such details pertaining to the shipping industry as marine insurance, research and logistics, and international shipping news.Edward Lloyd, the original owner of Lloyd’s Coffee House in London, started Lloyd’s News in the…

We followed Amanda Holden’s journey of genealogy in last night’s episode of Who Do You Think You Are?. She kick-started her research by searching for one of her ancestors on The British Newspaper Archive.Amanda’s mum, Judy, who had been working on their family tree, had been having difficulties finding out the last name of Collin’s wife, Radgoude, Amanda’s 5th great-grandmother. But, thanks to Amanda’s discovery on The British Newspaper Archive, she now had a new trail of clues to…

In last night’s episode, we learned that Danny Dyer is a direct descendant of King Edward III, his 15 times great-grandfather. Many of us lack such famous ancestors, but that doesn’t make ours – and the times they lived in – any less interesting. Let’s take a look at Danny Dyer’s working-class ancestors – some strong male figures that Danny was hoping to find – and learn how the British Newspaper Archive can help you flesh out the lives of our predecessors.Strong male figures…

HG Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds, the story of a Martian invasion of Earth, has had many adaptations since being published in 1898. It’s unlikely that any of these adaptations has developed such an aura of myth and infamy as the Orson Welles radio adaptation of 1938, which was alleged to have caused mass panic across the United States. Conducted as a drama broadcast via wireless, the program went out uninterrupted for more than an hour and portrayed the events…

It’s hard to believe, but The British Newspaper Archive has now reached the grand old age of three. We launched on 29 November 2011 with 4 million fully searchable historic newspaper pages and have come a long way since then.Please click the image to enlarge itA treasure trove of informationYou can now search more than 9 million pages, from over 300 British and Irish newspaper titles, spanning 1710-1954. Reading all of those pages would be no mean feat – we’ve estimated that it would…

We’ve recently donated 100 subscriptions to the Wikipedia community through the Wikipedia Library, a grant-funded programme which makes it easier for experienced volunteer editors to access research materials.It’s very exciting to be involved in this new partnership. It allows us to contribute to Wikipedia, one of the most frequently used reference tools in the world, and demonstrates how local British and Irish newspapers can help improve public information about historical topics from around the world.We asked Simon Tushingham, one…

Service Announcement – BNA search service maintenance this afternoonThat’s keyword search back up and running. Until two years ago (i.e. pre launch of The BNA!) there wasn’t an option to search these old newspapers by keyword – we certainly missed it for that short maintenance period : )Enjoy!Best wishes,Team BNA…

More content, more quickly! The BNA tech upgrade – an updateWe hope that you have all been enjoying the lovely Summer weather lately?You may have noticed that there has been a slow-down in the number of pages added to the site recently. There is a fantastic reason for this . . . [drumroll please] . . . We are delighted to announce that we have been busy working on upgrading our newspaper ingest and post-processing system. Once we’re up and running with the new system,…

We were delighted (and just a little star-struck!) to see John Bishop using the BNA website in last night’s ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ programme.John was looking for information on his gg-grandfather, Charles Bishop, who left the army in the 1850s to pursue a musical career, and he found several stories in the Archive about his musical ancestor.We’re going to post a couple of these stories on the blog shortly. But, in the meantime, if you live…